Recent content in Debian-Blog on RESEARCHUT
Preface: A Noob’s Journey into Agentic AI Although the AI surge felt like it was simmering for years, I jumped on the bandwagon relatively late—around November 2025. My very first interaction with AI was Perplexity through its web interface. As a complete novice, my expectations were honest and naive. It took multiple conversational iterations and several frustrated hours to finally grasp…
System76’s COSMIC Desktop Environment —written from the ground up in Rust—is one of the most exciting developments in the Linux desktop ecosystem. Built for modern Wayland composition, modularity, and high-performance UX, it has captured the attention of desktop enthusiasts across distributions. However, for users running Debian Testing or Debian Unstable , getting COSMIC onto their machines…
Immutable Atomic Linux Distirbutions Of late, I’ve been hearing a lot of (good) things about Immutable Linux Distributions, from friends, colleagues and mentors. It has been something on my plate for some time, to explore. But given the nature of the subject, it has been delayed for a while. Reasons are simple; I can only really judge this product if I use it for some time; and it has to be…
With KDE 6.5.0, PowerDevil has broken forced its own set of suspend/hibernate inhibitors onto logind. And to my knowledge, there’s no way to disable them. As a user, I’d prefer to set lid action as Do nothing and really expect KDE/PowerDevil to do nothing in that regard. But with KDE 6.5.0 PowerDevil forces those inhibitors whatsoever. ❯ systemd-inhibit --list WHO UID USER PID COMM…
apt-offline 1.8.6 apt-offline version 1.8.6 was released almost 3 weeks ago on 08/February/2025 This release includes many bug fixes from community users. Error out if we cannot initialize the APT lock. Thanks to Matthew Maslak check for checksum and handle appropriately (#217) Thanks to Dan Whitman (Github:kyp44) Honor the –allow-unauthenticated option. Thanks to João A (Github: Jonybat)…
Of the many things we care for in our garden, having some Carnivorous plants was also one to have. Plants are tricky. A lot of information they pass. And depending on where you are and what plants you are with, the results can vary. The Nepenthes family isn’t native to where I live but I still wanted to have them. While not impossible, though a difficult task to bring up such species. So…
Finally, TIL, what can all be the reason for systemd services to hang indefinitely. The internet is flooded with numerous reports on this topic but no clear answers. So no more uselessly marked workarounds like: systemctl daemon-reload and systemctl-daemon-reexec for this scenario. The scene would be something along the lines of: rrs 6467 0.0 0.0 23088 15852 pts/1 Ss 12:53 0:00 | | \_ /bin/bash…
There surely is need for better tooling on the BTRFS File System side. While migrating my setup from one machine to another, this is one issue I came to be aware of, only today, when my backup tool ( btrbk ) complained about it. Following the pointers, I see the below snippet in btrfs-subvolume manual page. A snapshot that was created by send/receive will be read-only, with different last change…
apt-offline 1.8.4 apt-offline version 1.8.4 has been released. This release includes many bug fixes but the important ones are: Better GPG signature handling Support for verifying InRelease files Changelog apt-offline (1.8.4-1) unstable; urgency=medium [ Debian Janitor ] * Update standards version to 4.5.0, no changes needed. [ Paul Wise ] * Clarify file type in unknown file message * Fix typos *…
After a hiatus of 6 years, it was nice to be back with the ThinkPad. This blog post briefly touches upon my impressions with the current generation ThinkPad T14 Gen2 AMD variant. ThinkPad T14 Gen2 AMD Lenovo It took 8 weeks to get my hands on the machine. Given the pandemic, restrictions and uncertainities, not sure if I should call it an ontime delivery. This was a CTO - Customise-to-order; so…
The Lotus story so far My very first experience with water flowering plants was pretty good. I learnt a good deal of things; from setting up the pond, germinating the lotus seeds, setting up the right soil, witnessing the growth of the lotus plant, fish eco-system to take care of the pond . Overall, a lot of things learnt. But I couldn’t succeed in getting the Lotus flower. A lot many…
In my past, I’ve had experiences that have had me thinking. My experiences have been mostly in the South Asian Indian Sub-Continent, so may not be fair to generalize it. Help with finding a job: I’ve learnt many times, that when people reach out asking for help, say, for helping them with finding a job; it isn’t about you making a recommendation/referral for them. It, instead,…
I was quite impressed by the ability of this insect; yet to be. The way it has camouflaged itself is mesmerizing. I’ll let the video do the talking as this one is going to be difficult to express in words.
This blog post is about my observations of some of the plants in my home garden. While still a n00b on the subject, these notes are my observations and experiences over days, weeks and months. Thankfully, with the capability to take frequent pictures, it has been easy to do an assessment and generate a report of some of these amazing behaviors of plants, in an easy timeline order; all thanks to…
Why is it so hard to have a proper download manager in today’s day ? We had it in the previous decade. Or do tech giants self-proclaim that the world lives only in their cloud. At one point, there used to be great download managers for all major web browsers, either in-built, or external. Then came the latest trend with Chrome and Firefox, where they make it difficult to have an external…
As a person who prefers full access to data in the simplest format, while at the same time having it useful with latest technologies, my quest for trying things out is an ongoing activity. Earlier, I blogged about my needs of collating news feeds in a simple format, readily accessible offline, while still being useful and aligned with the modern paradigm. In today’s age, the other common…
I’ve mostly had the preference of controlling my data rather than depend on someone else. That’s one reason why I still believe email to be my most reliable medium for data storage, one that is not plagued/locked by a single entity. If I had the resources, I’d prefer all digital data to be broken down to its simplest form for storage, like email format, and empower the user with…
KDE Impressions These days, I often hear a lot about Wayland. And how much of effort is being put into it; not just by the Embedded world but also the usual Desktop systems, namely KDE and GNOME. In recent past, I switched back to KDE and have been (very) happy about the switch. Even though the KDE 4 (and initial KDE 5) debacle had burnt many, coming back to a usable KDE desktop is always a…
Curiosity I guess this would be common to most of us. While I grew up, right from the childhood itself, the sky was always an intriguing view. The Stars, the Moon, the Eclipses; were all fascinating. As a child, in my region, religion and culture; the mythology also built up stories around it. Lunar Eclipses have a story of its own. During Solar Eclipses, parents still insist that we do not go…
As we grow old, so do our computing machines. And just like we don’t decommission ourselves, so should be the case of the machines. They should be semi-retired, delegating major tasks to newer machines while they can still serve some less demaning work: File Servers, UPNP Servers et cetera. It is common on a Debian installer based derivative, and otherwise too, to use block encryption on…
Laptop Mode Tools 1.74 Laptop Mode Tools version 1.74 has been released. This release includes important bug fixes , some defaults settings updated to current driver support in Linux and support for devices with nouveau based nVIDIA cards. A filtered list of changes is mentioned below. For the full log, please refer to the git repository 1.74 - Sat Jul 18 19:10:40 IST 2020 * With 4.15+ kernels,…
Setting up a Sony PS3 Blu-Ray Disc Remote Controller with Kodi TLDR; Since most of the articles on the internet were either obsolete or broken, I’ve chosen to write these notes down in the form of a blog post so that it helps me now and in future, and hopefully others too. Raspberry Pi All this time, I have been using the Raspberry Pi for my HTPC needs. The first RPi I acquired was in 2014…
apt-offline 1.8.2 I am pleased to announce the release of apt-offline version 1.8.2 This release has many bug fixes along with a long standing issue of signature validation 2017 - The year of realization and change Back in 2017, the bug was reported that apt-offline did not validate apt meta Packages files. apt-offline was only doing a signature validation for the Release files but did no…
Laptop Mode Tools 1.73 I am pleased to announce the release of Laptop Mode Tools version 1.73 This release includes many bug fixes. For user convenience, 2 command options have been added. rrs@priyasi:~$ laptop_mode -h **************************** Following user commands are understood status : Display a Laptop Mode Tools power savings status power-stats : Display the power statistics on the…
Integrating Comments on Hugo with Isso Oh! Boy. Finally been able to get something set up almost to my liking. After moving away from Drupal to Hugo, getting the commenting system in place was challenging. There were many solutions but I was adamant to what I wanted. Simple. Something very simple so that I can spend very limited time to tickle with (especially 2 years down the line) Independent.…
User Mode Linux 5.2 User Mode Linux version 5.2 has been uploaded to Debian Unstable and will soon be available on the supported architectures. This upload took more time than usual as I ran into a build time failure caused by newer PCAP library. Thanks to active upstream developers, this got sorted out quick . In the longer run, we may have a much better fix for it. What is User Mode Linux a.k.a…
BPF Compiler Collection 0.11.0 bpfcc version 0.11.0 has been uploaded to Debian Unstable and should be accessible in the repositories by now. After the 0.8.0 release, this has been the next one uploaded to Debian. Multiple source respositories This release brought in dependencies to another set of sources from the libbpf project. In the upstream repo, this is still a topic of discussion on how to…
Experiences setting up a Lotus Pond Pot A novice’s first time experience setting up a Lotus pond and germinating the Lotus seeds to a full plant The trigger Our neighbors have a very nice Lotus setup in the front of their garden, with flowers blooming in it. It is really a pleasing experience to see it. With lifestyles limiting to specifics, I’m glad to be around with like minded…
Linux and ARM With more ARM based devices in the market, and with them getting more powerful every day, it is more common to see more of ARM images for your favorite Linux distribution. Of them, Debian has become the default choice for individuals and companies to base their work on. It must have to do with Debian’s long history of trying to support many more architectures than the rest of…
If I look back now, it must be more than 20 years since I got fascinated with GNU/Linux ecosystem and started using it. Back then, it was more curiosity of a young teenager and the excitement to learn something. There’s one thing that I have always admired/respected about Free Software’s values, is: Access for everyone to learn . This is something I never forget and still try to do my…
TL;DR: Migrating my website from Drupal 7 to Hugo Jump directly to the end titled Migration to Hugo Initial website Looking back at my website’s history, the domain was first registered sometime in 2003. Back then, it was mostly a couple of html pages. Being (and still) a novice in web, my website was mostly on ideas from others. IIRC, for the bare html one, I took a lot of look wise details…
sg3-utils, version 1.44, was recently uploaded to Debian. This new upstream release has happened almost 2.5 years after the last release. One important feature to emphasize about is some support for NVMe disks, which are now getting more common on latest range of laptops. rrs@priyasi:~$ sudo sg_inq /dev/nvme0 [sudo] password for rrs: Identify controller for /dev/nvme0: Model number: PC401 NVMe SK…
What a way to make a gift! I’m pleased to announce the 1.72 release of Laptop Mode Tools. Major changes include the port of the GUI configuration utility to Python 3 and PyQt5. Some tweaks, fixes and enhancements in current modules. Extending {black,white}list of devices to types other than USB. Listing of devices by their devtype attribute. A filtered list of changes is mentioned below. For…
It is interesting how a user-space task could lead to hinder a Linux kernel software suspend operation. [11735.155443] PM: suspend entry (deep) [11735.155445] PM: Syncing filesystems ... done. [11735.215091] [drm:wait_panel_status [i915]] *ERROR* PPS state mismatch [11735.215172] [drm:wait_panel_status [i915]] *ERROR* PPS state mismatch [11735.558676] rfkill: input handler enabled [11735.608859]…
apt-offline 1.8.1 [released]( https://github.com/rickysarraf/apt- offline/releases/tag/v1.8.1). This is a bug fix release fixing some python3 glitches related to module imports. Recommended for all users. apt-offline (1.8.1) unstable; urgency=medium Switch setuptools to invoke py3 No more argparse needed on py3 Fix genui.sh based on comments from pyqt mailing list Bump version number to 1.8.1 --…
I am pleased to announce the release of apt-offline , version 1.8.0 . This release is mainly a forward port of apt-offline to Python 3 and PyQt5. There are some glitches related to Python 3 and PyQt5, but overall the CLI interface works fine. Other than the porting, there’s also an important bug fixed, related to memory leak when using the MIME library. And then there’s some updates to…
PSA: Research in the domain of Ayurveda http://www.patanjaliresearchfoundation.com/patanjali/ I am so glad to see this initiative taken by the Patanjali group. This is a great stepping stone in the health and wellness domain. So far, Allopathy has been blunt in discarding alternate medicine practices, without much solid justification. The only, repetitive, response I’ve heard is “lack…
This has gotten me finally ask the question All this time since my childhood, I grew up reading, hearing and watching that the core economy of India is Agriculture. And that it needs the highest bracket in the budgets of the country. It still applies today. Every budget has special waivers for the agriculture sector, typically in hundreds of thousands of crores in India Rupees. The most recent to…
Bugs can be annoying. Especially the ones that crash or hang and do not have a root cause. A good example of such annoyance can be kernel bugs, where a faulty hardware/device driver hinders the kernel’s suspend/resume process. Because, as a user, while in the middle of your work, you suspend your machine hoping to resume your work, back when at your destination. But, during suspend, or…
जीवन का सत्य, शमशान। शिव का है स्थान। काली का तांडव नृत्य। शिव का करे अभिनन्दन।
I own a Fitbit Surge. But Fitibit chose to remain exclusive in terms of interoperability. Which means to make any sense out of the data that the watch gathers, you need to stick with what Fitbit mandates. Fair enough in today’s trends. It also is part of their business model to restrict useful aspects of the report to **Premium Membership. **Again, fair enough in today’s business'…
In my ongoing quest to get Tablet-Mode working on my Hybrid machine, here’s how I’ve been living with it so far. My intent is to continue using Free Software for both use cases. My wishful thought is to use the same software under both use cases. Browser: On the browser front, things are pretty decent. Chromium has good support for Touchscreen input. Most of the Touchscreen use cases…
I am pleased to announce the 1.71 release of Laptop Mode Tools. This release includes some new modules, some bug fixes, and there are some efficiency improvements too. Many thanks to our users; most changes in this release are contributions from our users. A filtered list of changes in mentioned below. For the full log, please refer to the git repository. Source tarball, Feodra/SUSE RPM Packages…
LIO -fb is the new SCSI Target for Debian. Previously, we maintained the LIO tools from the pre-fork upstream branch. But, with good reasons, we’ve now moved to the newer -fb (Free Branch). As the maintainer for those pacakges, I have a local LIO setup. Overy the years, I’ve been tuning and using this setup with a bunch of SCSI clients. Now with the new -fb packages it was worrisome…
Now that we prepare for the next Debian Stable release (Stretch), it is time to provide some updates on what the current state of some of the (storage related) packages in Debian is. This is not an update on the complete list of packages related to storage, but it does cover some of them. REMOVALS iscsitarget - The iscsitarget stood as a great SCSI target for the Linux kernel. It seems to have had…
I am happy to announce the release of apt-offline 1.7.2 . This has turned out in time for the next release of Debian, i.e. Debian Stretch. A long standing cosmetic issue in CLI of the progress bar total item count has been fixed. There are also a bunch of other bug fixes, for which the specifics are present in the git logs. Also, in this release, we’ve tried to catch-up on the Graphical…
Most GNOME users may be using one or more extensions for the GNOME Shell. These extensions allow extending functionality for the shell, or modify default behavior, to suit the taste of many users, who may want more than the default. Having flexibility to customize the desktop to ones personal need is a great feature, and the extensions help achieve them. The GNOME Shell Extensions distribution…
I’m pleased to announce the release of Laptop Mode Tools, version 1.70. This release adds support for AHCI Runtime PM, introduced in Linux 4.6. It also includes many important bug fixes, mostly related to invocation and determination of power states. Changelog: 1.70 - Sat Sep 24 16:51:02 IST 2016 * Deal harder with broken battery states * On machines with 2+ batteries, determine states from…
I am happy to mention the release of apt-offline, version 1.7.1. This release includes many bug fixes, code cleanups and better integration. Integration with PolicyKit Better integration with apt gpg keyring Resilient to failures when a sub-task errors out New Feature: Changelog This release adds the ability to deal with package changelogs (’ set ’ command option: --generate-changelog…
Recently, we had the User-Mode Linux suite out of Debian, which included user- mode-linux, user-mode-linux-doc and uml-utilities package. We are happy that we were able to bring it back into the archvie quick, and hope to maintain it active. For many who may not know about UML, here’s a discription from its website : User-Mode Linux is a safe, secure way of running Linux versions and Linux…